


as he counts the days of the week

by DefineSane



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Psychological Discomfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:53:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DefineSane/pseuds/DefineSane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walls are good, he would tell himself. Walls will hold you in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as he counts the days of the week

Sometimes on Saturday nights Will would go outside and lie down on the ground and wait for one of his dogs to curl against him before sleeping until morning. Only Saturdays, because if he allowed himself to do it more than one out of seven days it would become a habit and then a compulsion and then he would get lost in the terrible, bright openness his life would become. Walls are good, he would tell himself. Walls will hold you in.

Sometimes on Mondays he would let himself sit in the quiet of his living room and he wouldn’t move for the entire day. He never scheduled classes on Mondays. A fellow professor had tried to switch time slots with him last year, some shockingly boring middle-aged man that, for how mundane he was, must have taught one of the trigonometry of crime classes (blood splatter angles and lengths of tire marks measured against the psychopathy Will sometimes felt in the hollow at the back of his neck). Will had declined, and continued to decline without explanation.

It was a Tuesday when he realized he had a problem. Somewhere between his second and third ribs nestled a balloon that expanded into the space of his lungs from Tuesday to Friday and the tightness of the valve stung badly enough that Tuesday for him to realize he was not only living from week to week by looking forward to moments when existence was just something that happened, but he was also planning his life based on arbitrary points in time.

He imagined himself five years in the future and when he didn’t see an inky veil he saw himself waking up at 7AM every day, pills in a white paper cup, breakfast at 7:30AM, the tasteful painting behind a questioning therapist, exercise at 10AM, lunch at noon, a group of blank, broken face every other afternoon and sometimes there would be art therapy before dinner at 5PM. He would sleep every night in a box designed specifically to contain him, and one out of seven days a week the balloon in his ribs would inflate to a painful size and he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all for the discomfort of unrelieved anticipation that it lent him.

He had an easy time imagining this Will. He might never exist, but he would always lurk near existence, somewhere in the middle of a field waiting to be pulled inside, out of the cold of a New England winter that still felt unnatural to him after the humid warmth of a Louisianan childhood, out of the cold and into the white, sterile box that longed for him almost as much as he longed for it.

Will longed for open spaces (the rippled horizon of the sea or an especially large lake, something big enough to pull him over and under) and he longed for walls (it’s amazing how full it can feel with just one person in the room) but most of all he longed to know what was inside himself well enough to pick just one.


End file.
